Exactly right. This is about as literal as him encouraging the Russians to hack Hillary’s server when he made a joke about her missing emails saying, “maybe the Russians can find them...”
Only an idiot takes every spoken word to it’s literal meaning.
Not only ‘maybe the russians can find them’, but “if you do, you’d be the hero of the media”, which so clearly was a joke and a stab at how uninterested the media was in anything that might make Clinton look bad.